UK Government Wants "Unsavory" Web Content To Be Removed 250
An anonymous reader writes "The UK minister for immigration and security, James Brokenshire has called for the government to do more to deal with 'unsavoury', rather than illegal, material online. 'Terrorist propaganda online has a direct impact on the radicalisation of individuals and we work closely with the internet industry to remove terrorist material hosted in the UK or overseas,' Brokenshire told Wired.co.uk in a statement."
Fascists (Score:5, Insightful)
Enough said.
Re:Fascists (Score:5, Insightful)
In other news, most of Britain wants the UK Government to be removed and replaced by people who are not asshats. Unfortunately, it turns out that nobody who is not an asshat can be persuaded to want the job.
Some sort of weird catch 22 (Score:2)
Re:Fascists (Score:5, Insightful)
In other news, most of Britain wants the UK Government to be removed and replaced by people who are not asshats. Unfortunately, it turns out that nobody who is not an asshat can be persuaded to want the job.
In yet other news ... here's an idea! If you are concerned about propaganda causing your citizens to become "radicalized", why not take the most effective steps possible to prevent that? Create the most sane, free, reasonably run society in which civil rights are sacrosanct, all of the laws are sensible, and all of the laws are equally enforced.
You'll find that far fewer of the citizens would ever want to do anything to oppose that. It's more effective than playing whack-a-mole with an ever-growing list of terrorists.
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That only works if the population has a certain minimum level of education. That is why when countries that have been dictatorships for a very long time suddenly become democracies they often just elect extremists on the orders of religious leaders anyway. Unfortunately politicians in the UK have been working tirelessly to polarize people and stamp out any kind of reasoned political or philosophical thinking, preferring people to vote based on gut feelings they get from listening to soundbites and seeing at
Re:Fascists (Score:5, Funny)
Her corgis could probably do a better job than the last few governments.
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I have no idea what Her Majesty's policies would be, but while her reign has managed to outlive that of Fidel Castro, it must eventually end. Next in line is Prince Charles, and that would be an absolute disaster.
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I don't follow the royals, but wasn't there a prince who spent a long time in the military, and simply chose not to take the figurehead post at the top but rather worked his way up as a junior officer? Sounds like his head at least is in the right place. Someone who both values working for a living and has shown real loyalty to the UK would seem ideal here. And I'd think the royals have enough money to be a strong influence on politics regardless of their official powers.
Re:Fascists (Score:5, Informative)
Not sure who you're talking about, possibly Lord Mountbatten who did work his way up from midshipman to the head of the armed forces though he was never that close to being in line to the UK throne (he was the son of a German Prince and Great Grandson of Queen Victoria IIRC). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L... [wikipedia.org]
Most of the Royals start at the bottom (as officers though) in the armed forces and are expected to perform much as anyone else, eg Prince William who will probably be King one day, served in combat in Afghanistan as a helicopter pilot and afterwards in search and rescue. His combat phase was shorter then he and his family really wanted but being heir to the throne means having a big target painted on you.
I like the idea of royalty actually serving in the forces and getting first hand experience in the horrors of war.
As for the influence of the Queen on politics, she has weekly meetings with the Prime Minister and sort of serves as a senior non-partison adviser to the government.
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It's doubtful that while in tour they are put in any real harms way like the average low ranking officer. Certainly never made to ride in a poorly armoured vehicle. Considering that he had the best education money can buy he did pretty poorly at GCSE and A Level too.
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Why? It's not like he has any power.
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The GP proposal was for the Queen to take over, implying that he would get power eventually.
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Unfortunately, beheading Charles didn't end well for the English, either. Note that that was their last experiment with a republic.
Re:Fascists (Score:5, Interesting)
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Plus we have a long history of killing monarchs who get a bit beyond themselves, which I feel ought to motivate in ways that mere Prime Ministers and their weenies are, sadly, not.
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The Queen doesn't have any real power. On paper she might be able to delay the government somewhat but due to past problems the current law is very clear that the final say on pretty much everything comes down to parliament.
We would be much better off getting rid of the Queen and having an elected House of Lords. Also we could open up all the palaces to tourists and rake in even more cash, while still keeping all the pageantry and history going. Most other countries that got rid of their royals did that and
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Spineless cunt, if you're going to be a cunt, be a cunt with your own name.At least be a principled cunt. Cunt.
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Spineless cunt, if you're going to be a cunt, be a cunt with your own name.At least be a principled cunt. Cunt.
Calling anonymous cowards names doesn't help, sadly. They're already willing to put their words under the name "coward", since they already know what they are. You think that you can hurt them more than knowing they constantly live in fear?
Re:Fascists (Score:5, Funny)
I think it's a bad thing to repress free speech. Without hearing your ignorant invective firsthand we couldn't appreciate how fucked up you truly are.
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> Why do you think 'Fascism' is bad?
The book burning is an obvious bad sign.
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Book burning, hmm, it actually comes in two categories. The first one is evil when you burn other peoples books or publicly owned books. The second one is humorous, when you burn books you have bought. When you burn books you have bought, obviously the purchase of that book drives sales and hence more will be printed, also the book you have bought by burning is removed from the second hand market. So burning a religious book you have purchased makes absolutely no difference other than making a categorical
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Burning in-print books bought new does indeed seem counterproductive. The increased demand will just make the book more widely known and more readilly available, the opposite of the goal.
Burning in-print books bought secondhand will drive up the secondhand price making it more expensive for people to get a copy of the book but with a cap effectively set by the price of a new copy of the book.
Burning out of print books on the other hand can really reduce the availability if the rightsholder doesn't authorise
Too bad. (Score:2)
Re:Too bad. (Score:5, Informative)
Been in the UK in the last 50 years? They've got ludicrous bureaucracies for *everything*. There are reasons that "1984" and "V for Vigilante" were set there, and that London has the highest percentage of government mandated CCTV/capita. Note also that they don't actually *use* the CCTV's to fight crime. They use them for bureaucratic monitoring, such as insisting that people pay the tax for cars in London, or that they park correctly. They're not used for pickpocketing, luggage theft, or even prosecuting vandals. (Those personal crimes are not considered "important enough" to justify checking the video records. Been there, done that.)
Having yet another bureaucracy means more control of political discussion, pure and simple.
Re:Too bad. (Score:4, Informative)
There are reasons that "1984" and "V for Vigilante"were set there, and that London has the highest percentage of government mandated CCTV/capita.
I believe that would be V for Vendetta.
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V for Vulgar?
Re:Too bad. (Score:5, Insightful)
You're right. No-one has been convicted on CCTV evidence in the UK. Apart from all the people who were.
Re:Too bad. (Score:5, Insightful)
There are reasons that "1984"(sic) and "V for Vigilante"(sic) were set there
Yes. Because the UK has a disproportionately high number of a good writers, and both Eric Blair and Alan Moore live(d) there.
Note also that they don't actually *use* the CCTV's to fight crime. They use them for bureaucratic monitoring, such as insisting that people pay the tax for cars in London, or that they park correctly. They're not used for pickpocketing, luggage theft, or even prosecuting vandals.
They use the CCTV for all of those things. I think you've been reading too much Daily Mail.
(Those personal crimes are not considered "important enough" to justify checking the video records. Been there, done that.)
They tend to use the CCTV live. To guide cops to the places where these things are happening. Combing back through recordings is a different matter, with a different balance. It's a significant use of resources to comb through the video, and then the individuals are long gone from the scene of the crime, and are unlikely to be easily identified. It obviously won't be worth it for for petty crimes. But it is done for more serious crimes.
Not that I'm in favour of all the CCTV. But lying about the uses it's put to isn't helpful.
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> But lying about the uses it's put to isn't helpful.
> (Those personal crimes are not considered "important enough" to justify checking the video records.
He was specific and correct based on my experience in the UK of 2007.
Continue to troll away. That doesn't change the reality.
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Based on my experience of the past 34-and-a-bit years in the UK, he was talking complete bollocks, but continue to talk bollocks. That doesn't change the reality.
Re:Too bad. (Score:4, Informative)
Well, yes. That's what the cameras are for. If you put up a camera labelled "Congestion Charge Enforcement", then the only thing that camera can do - by law - is record the license numbers of cars that drive past it. And the only thing that can legally be done with that record is to compare it with the database of cars whose congestion charge is paid up for the day they were observed.
Any other use of that record would be a criminal offence. That's EU/UK data protection laws, and the US could profit from it.
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There are reasons that "1984" and "V for Vigilante" were set there, and that London has the highest percentage of government mandated CCTV/capita.
1984 was published in 1949. Orwell was a forward thinking kinda guy but he didn't know about 21st century CCTV cameras.
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Don't forget Max Headroom.
Rember that porn filter (Score:5, Insightful)
Welcome to the slippery slope. First porn for the children, then illegal torrents, now what ever they feel like banning enjoy your fascism, And remember big brother GCHQ is watching.
Re:Rember that porn filter (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Rember that porn filter (Score:4, Insightful)
I think a lot of people are changing aspects of their behavior.
I encrypt most communications with friends and family now, just to be a dick to whoever's doing surveillance. It's not that I care so much about protecting what's in those communications as I just don't want their lives to be one bit easier than they need to be.
Sometimes I run Tor for the most mundane things, like looking for a recipe for chocolate flan cake, or the lyrics to songs by Bombay Bicycle Club. It really doesn't add more than a few seconds to what I'm doing and it gives me a tiny bit of satisfaction.
For all I know, they have a back door to GPG and other crypto, but I can't do anything about that.
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And then just the act of using a darknet is grounds for jail. Wont matter what content, just that they catch you doing it.
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It is unlikely that they will do something as obvious as that. It will be more like upgrade to existing crimes or make it so that using a darknet shows intent to commit a crime.
So you wrote something offensive? Antisocial Behaviour, it could get you an ABSO. You wrote it while hiding your tracks with Tor? Now we are talking conspiracy or perverting the course of justice.
And what if you run a Tor node yourself but do not commit any crimes? Surely you are aware that others might be using it for bad things, so
Re:Rember that porn filter (Score:5, Insightful)
The slope of course they are heading for, user pays. Want to put up a web site, why should the public have to pay to ensure it is 'safe' and acceptable. A simple preview fee to ensure that it meets government requirements, say around $10,000 (fully tax deductible of course) should be enough to push most people off the internet and if fees are to difficult due to continual changes perhaps $1,000,000 permanent licence fee to guarantee all troublesome sites are blocked (not porn sites of course they can afford it). The goal to force the internet back to the preferred main stream media model where only the few can afford to publish content and the majority are silenced. The majority need to be told what to think and they are the only ones with those evil anti-government thoughts, not to tell each other what they are actually thinking. Poms actually voted for this government, what the fuck were they thinking.
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Looks like freedom provided by the government is on the way out. Time to get our own freedom: time for darknets. They can block what ever plain text crap they want, but when then come for the crypto and P2P routing, thats where we have to make a stand. That is the last hope, and we better not lose that. I'd like to stop this craziness before then, but we absolutely can't let them force all crypto or acceptance of incoming connections to be on a whitelist. As the darknets continue to defeat their filtering w
Oh yeah, wasn't that the filter... (Score:5, Informative)
...designed by an advisor who was later arrested for CP [dailymail.co.uk]?
Fuck you, James Brokenshire. How's that for unsavory?
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Someone from the country of Jim Crow laws shouldn't really be throwing stones in their glass house. Plus you lot persecuted homosexuals just as energetically.
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If that's the best you've go then we're in a pretty good position really. If you've got to go digging that far back then you aren't terribly good at finding our faults. That much is certain.
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If it helps any, I don't believe the U.S. government should be deciding what is acceptable on the web either.
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Oh yeah, wasn't that the filter designed by an advisor who was later arrested for CP?
No.
...whose brilliant standards of morality lead to the persecution and destruction of everyone from Oscar Wilde to Alan Turing?
Are you from the US? If so, would you like to discuss standards of morality in the US 60 years ago?
everyone from Oscar Wilde to Alan Turing?
What does that even mean? I think what you meant was "some people, including Oscar Wilde and Alan Turing."
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Can you browse those million pictures of naked Americans? No? Then you surely didn't get value for money!
Unsavoury? (Score:2, Funny)
So, they are going to take down or block all the assorted unsavoury government web sites?
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So, they are going to take down or block all the assorted unsavoury government web sites?
Or better still they clearly need to block themselves in perpetuity (to quote from one of their former "dear leaders", it would deny them the "oxygen of publicity")
Sure, let's lose the unsavoury stuff. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Sure, let's lose the unsavoury stuff. (Score:5, Funny)
And 5) The Daily Mail.
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7) British cuisine?
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Not entirely true. We did invent the pudding, though the name is french.
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yeah and you made it out of blood. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Americans started making pudding out of chocolate like we were civilized.
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Great, now I want some black pudding.
We are out of those. However, we can provide plenty of ochre jellies or gray oozes instead. Please roll a save vs. psychic crush.
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I've often thought a surgical strike on tabloid newspaper offices would make Britain a happier and more tolerant place.
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You didn't get the joke.
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The legal profession would like to thank the professions in positions 3-5 for being more unsavory.
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Fixed that for you.
One man's terrorist (Score:5, Insightful)
One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter.
Fuck the UK and their censorship.
Re:One man's terrorist (Score:4, Insightful)
Don't blame all of us. It's just our government being full of idiots right now. Nothing much we can do about it - even when elections run around, censorship policy is rather low on the agenda right now.
Re:One man's terrorist (Score:5, Insightful)
There is massive support for this kind of policy among the UK population. Perhaps not among young people in London, but practically everyone else welcomes government Internet censorship.
And you know this, why? Because of what you read in the papers or see on TV?
It all depends on the questions you ask. "Do you want to protect children from predators?" "Of course I do!". "See sir, another supporter of Internet censorship."
Safe From Radicals (Score:2)
Good to know England is once again fighting to keep the world safe from those who advocate the violent overthrow of the lawful government [about.com].
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Why don't we ask the Chileans, the Iraqis, the Indonesians and the Iranians about that.
headline != article (Score:5, Insightful)
UK Government Wants "Unsavory" Web Content To Be Removed
The UK minister for immigration and security, James Brokenshire has called for the government to do more...
One bureaucrat suggesting the government should do more to flag YouTube videos is not the same as the UK Government wanting to actually do it.
Re:headline != article (Score:5, Informative)
The minister is not a bureaucrat. I can't tell whether you don't know what a "bureaucrat" is, or whether you don't understand the UK's political structure
James Brokenshire is a politician. So a bunch of people vote for James, rather than the other options they were given, to represent them in the Commons, the elected part of the Parliament of the UK. Then, David Cameron - also a politician, and the leader of the biggest political party in the Commons, thus Prime Minister - selected James to be in charge of immigration and security. The actual people running immigration and security are all bureaucrats, but the guy at the top of the pile, deciding what to do, rather than doing it is the Minister, James, who is a politician.
Now, "immigration and security" has bugger all to do with the Internet, so you are correct that James' opinion is not magically UK Government policy, but it's a mistake to say he's just a "bureaucrat". James gets to make policy, albeit not directly on this subject.
Yeah, let's solve problems we made ourselves (Score:2, Interesting)
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I never understood this desire to shut down dissenting opinion. I want to hear what the people that hate me have to say. It's information I need. The more they have to say the better I like it.
since the USA is not "that guy" anymore (Score:2)
I know a better way to radicalise people (Score:2)
"Terrorist propaganda online has a direct impact on the radicalisation of individuals and we work closely with the internet industry to remove terrorist material hosted in the UK or overseas,"
Trying to restrict the free flow of information through censorious means is a sure way to get a few radicals. So is trying to enforce your rule and remove info that isn't in your country.
Slippery slope (Score:2)
Nope, not one of those.. not at all.. Is anyone surprised?
Welcome to Australia, circa 2009 (Score:2, Informative)
So Stephen Conroy decided to try his hand at UK politics?
We dealt with this same problem in Australia about 5 years ago and the people spoke. The minister was out, the policy trashed, and life went on.
American giving up the internet (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:American giving up the internet (Score:5, Informative)
Get off the soapbox. We have no moral superiority, and we don't even rank that high in freedom of the press. We're below the UK FFS.
http://en.rsf.org/press-freedo... [rsf.org]
Re: American giving up the internet (Score:2, Informative)
I beg to differ. Look at their prison system and population. What you are looking for is probably Switzerland. Even France would be better.
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Most of Scandinavia is doing a lot better than we are, too. I'm semi-seriously looking into emigrating to Sweden. Iceland is also on the list for consideration.
Self censoring already the standard (Score:2, Informative)
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Not spouting bigotry is being polite. Some self-censorship is a good thing.
The world becomes less free everyday (Score:2, Interesting)
The involvement of governernment to limit freedom is now a daily activity. Not just in the U.K.
I can't imagine how a website "radicalized anybody", wouldn't you really need to be radical to begin with?
It will soon lead to: well we have banned any political opposition to the current ruling party, watch it's comming!
fuk off beta (Score:2, Informative)
go away beta
Yes, well, when the tide comes in... (Score:2)
.. it washes away my sand castles. Let's stop the tide from coming in.
In theory, anyone can point at any DNS root servers that they want to. In practice, most peoples' moms don't know how to do that. In practice, "the internet", as far as most moms are concerned, is whatever Google indexes. If the big search engines decide to start indexing from some alternative set of root servers, then all the ISPs will point there, too, and ICANN won't survive a week.
Define "Unsavory" (Score:4, Insightful)
Does that just mean anything the government does not like? Would a video of police beating an innocent man be considered "unsavory?'
I don't believe it ! (Score:2)
DASCOMBE: It's not our job to believe it, Lewis. Our job is to tell the people -- ref [imdb.com]
Certainly... (Score:3)
UK Government Wants "Unsavory" Web Content To Be Removed
I can certainly agree with this and, I might add, we can start by deleting all traces of any online recipes that call for (*shudder*) fucking tropical fruit such as pineapple as a goddamned pizza topping.
On an slightly less sarcastic note (note that I wasn't completely joking about the fucking abomination that's pineapple pizza, BTW), someone please bash in the skulls of these stupid fascist puppet fucks. Now.
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I for one (Score:2)
By your actions you will be known (Score:2)
By your actions you will be known, not by what you say.
The blocking of sites is nothing else than censorship, and instead of blocking the sites and tracing the active on those sites the only thing that happens is that the sites will move, become more extreme and still be accessible by the followers.
And by that I mean that by imposing censorship on the terrorists you actually become what the terrorists want you to become.
Terrorists and children do share some common treats - it's when it gets silent that some
Positive feedback loop (Score:2)
'Terrorist propaganda online has a direct impact on the radicalisation of individuals and we work closely with the internet industry to remove terrorist material hosted in the UK or overseas,'
Hasn't history taught us that preventing free speech creates fertile ground for extremism? Spread their nonsense with a megaphone so that sane people can try to explain to them what is wrong with it. Without proper feedback, the rage grows.
A civics lesson for fat cunts (Score:2)
To the submitter of the article, theodp, Hugh Pickens and other uninformed twats:
When there's an actual bill introduced in the House Of Commons, then and only then can you correctly say "UK Government wants to ...".
When some random politician is spouting off, you can't. It's a non-story. Just STFU already.
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Which is limited in the UK. ( this isn't the US we are discussing here, this time )
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Oh yes it did. They've evolved into New Englanders now and I'm sure their ancestors would be shocked at how that's turned out.
Re:Freedom Rings In Crimea (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah. With a 96% vote. Nothing fishy about that... not at all...
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Few things are as unsavory as English cuisine.
In England it's 'unsavoury', you insensitive clod.